Accomplice and Collaborator Problems

[Balloon]

Yeah the more I think about this the more I'm curious myself. Why does effecting the enmity of another player effect server strain and what does distance have to do with that? Heck you can gain enmity on a mob from farther than you can see if you know what you are doing so not sure why 1/3 that distance is too much if it's another player

Server strain is becoming their new PS2 Limitations - but that response is just incredibly poorly worded.

Though transferring enmity is just a case of removing enmity for one player and adding enmity to another. I don't see what kind of strain that can really give considering near enough every JA and spell in the game adds an amount of enmity, including hitting things, and some remove enmity, like high jump, volatile lowering on it's own, and getting hit. Enmity changes are performed thousands of times per second in this game, so.. a couple of hundred thfs being able to accomplish would cause undue strain to the server? I don't see how..

[Calatilla]

Because THF getting anything useful would be bad, they gave the party hate stripping ability to SCH and then turn round and tell us that enmity is the main focus of THF. And now they`re saying our broken abilities are working as intended.

Heres a suggestion Dev Team, go play THF for a week and tell me it's fine.

[Byrth]

If what they've said in this thread was accurate, a valid form of protest would be spamming Collaborator every minute whenever possible. I'm pretty sure it's not, though, so such a protest would be a waste of time.

[Kjotu]

Server strain is becoming their new PS2 Limitations - but that response is just incredibly poorly worded.

Though transferring enmity is just a case of removing enmity for one player and adding enmity to another. I don't see what kind of strain that can really give considering near enough every JA and spell in the game adds an amount of enmity, including hitting things, and some remove enmity, like high jump, volatile lowering on it's own, and getting hit. Enmity changes are performed thousands of times per second in this game, so.. a couple of hundred thfs being able to accomplish would cause undue strain to the server? I don't see how..

you're missing an important part of how the ability works: enmity is stored on a mob, not a player. the problem is that when a player uses accomplice on another player, the server does not have a simple way to access all enmity towards the player. the only way to get this is by iterating over every nearby mob, and iterating again over each of their enmity lists checking to see if they have enmity towards the player.

it should be easy to see at this point that in certain situations, increasing the range could have a pretty significant impact on performance

[Byrth]

If the OP was asking about increasing the radius of monsters that are checked when someone uses collaborator, yeah.

But he just wanted to be able to use it from further away, so it's purely a "we made it less useful so you wouldn't use it as much" deal.

[Balloon]

you're missing an important part of how the ability works: enmity is stored on a mob, not a player. the problem is that when a player uses accomplice on another player, the server does not have a simple way to access all enmity towards the player. the only way to get this is by iterating over every nearby mob, and iterating again over each of their enmity lists checking to see if they have enmity towards the player.

it should be easy to see at this point that in certain situations, increasing the range could have a pretty significant impact on performance

That's a good point, one that I didn't think of when writing. I'm not really that knowledgeable on the intricacies of enmity, but I know that the enmity stolen from accomplish is based on the user, not the target, and stops working when the user is 20.6 yalms away from the mob - Even if the target is outside this range the hate will be stolen. In that sense, I feel it just checks the enmity tables of monsters nearby the user, and not both players. So using it on a member 20 yalms away shouldn't increase or decrease the performance vs using it on a member 2 yalms away.

I also wonder how different this operation is than casting cure on someone, in both instances hate tables have to be updated for the user and target, and the users hate table has to be updated for all the ones the target has acted on.

That said, a lot less simple than the example I outlined, so yeah. I was wrong about that.

[Aeron]

As the system process involved in checking the enmity surrounding the player causes additional stress on the server, we do not have any plans of adjusting the range of Accomplice and Collaborator.

And yet another example of why PS2 support needs to be dropped and the servers overhauled!

[Ulth]

you're missing an important part of how the ability works: enmity is stored on a mob, not a player. the problem is that when a player uses accomplice on another player, the server does not have a simple way to access all enmity towards the player. the only way to get this is by iterating over every nearby mob, and iterating again over each of their enmity lists checking to see if they have enmity towards the player.

it should be easy to see at this point that in certain situations, increasing the range could have a pretty significant impact on performance

I'm not asking to have the range of the mobs it affects to be increased, I'm asking to increase the range of the player it is used on. If it's stored on the mob that's all the better. It just checks all the mobs AROUND THE THIEF at the same distance as before, 8.5 yalms. At which point it checks those mobs' hate list, finds the hate value for the player it was used on, who can be far away, then decreases it by an amount, and increases the thief's hate by the same amount. I don't see how that is anymore strain on the system than before. Unless the strain is from thieves actually being able to make use of it now.

[Kjotu]

If the OP was asking about increasing the radius of monsters that are checked when someone uses collaborator, yeah.

But he just wanted to be able to use it from further away, so it's purely a "we made it less useful so you wouldn't use it as much" deal.

both CM responses seemed to indicate that the OP was asking about the steal radius (that's what I thought too, actually), and balloon was wondering how the radius would affect the server

[Byrth]

Well, the OP was talking about putting mages in danger by having a THF (potentially with hate) run over to them to activate these JAs. The JAs have a 12.6 yalm activate range, but work on any monsters in a circle with radius 20.6 yalms around the target. So the issue is not the effect range (which is sufficient and would cause the increased server load per use if increased), but the activation range.

Assuming the Community Rep knew what they were talking about, their statements indicate that Accomplice/Collaborator ranges are small so they won't be used as much because they cause unreasonable server load when used under the current conditions.